Voice messaging systems are well known in the art and take the form of, inter alia, answering machines, voice mail services, and personal computer based software that enables a personal computer to capture and playback telephone messages. Voice messaging systems typically answer an incoming call, play to the caller, a short announcement of the called party, record a caller's message and enable its playback at a later date or time. Prior art voice messaging systems do not provide a printed or “hard copy” of a message, nor do they readily provide for audio messages to be copied or forwarded elsewhere.
Some voice messaging systems use caller identification data that is provided by a carrier to associate an incoming caller's phone number and name with a voice message and, in some systems, to also provide a distinct ring based on the incoming caller's identity. Unfortunately, some telecommunications subscribers do not have “caller ID” available to them, or prefer not to pay for the service. In addition, the use of caller identification technology does not permit these systems to automatically produce a hardcopy of the contents of the message itself (similar to a “While You Were Out” memo).
Other voice messaging systems incorporate voice recognition technology to either initiate a phone call or associate an incoming caller's information, but voice-recognition systems have had only limited success because of technological limitations that are inherent to current voice recognition technology.
Other voice recognition systems associate a digitized version of a voice message with the incoming caller's identity, which is available via “caller ID” data, and allow the creation of a digitized copy of the voice message. An example of such a system is the Digital Secretary, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,651,055 (Argade; assigned to Lucent Technologies, Inc.). Unfortunately, the digitized copy does not include a human-readable text representation of the message. None of the contents of the message itself are readily accessible by a person in hardcopy form.
A voice message system that provides a printed copy of the message as well as an audio copy of the message would overcome limitations of prior art systems which do not accurately identify callers by voice recognition and cannot accurately transcribe speech into printed text.